Mimi - Ch. 171 - Lipstick.

[Vimuninna]

That's literally not it. Many people can easily tell you that the circumference of the earth is just 40k kilometers.
If we compare the earth to anything it's just to set a sense of scale. Just a different way of saying "It's not just big, is THIS BIG". Like your veins or nerves put together.

The issue we have with imperial units is that they are so unintuitive and dumb that you guys can't literally convert them into each other mentally and it's such a needlessly hard exercise that you can't say 10 tons, you must compare them to school buses because you can't mentally picture how much is a lot of something.

It's not 10 meters, it's X bananas, it's not 800 kgs it's X washing machines.

It's not silly or quirky it's just dumb.

First phrase you gotta learn to understand Americans, "If it's dumb and it works, it's not dumb."

For pretty much every unit but miles I'd say most people could convert them mentally since its just the multiplication table. If its still hard for them despite being basic math, the problem might be that they either don't care about the conversation, forgot it because it didn't come up enough, or didn't know math in the first place.

You don't really have to convert feet to miles, miles are for long distances, feet and inches are for short lengths (and yards get ignored outside of sports). This kinda applies to metric too, most distances are measured in kilometers, most lengths are measured in meters, centimeters, or milimeters. Converting between them in these two cases isn't neccessary for either system. I go "1-1/2 miles" you go "2.34km" neither of us converted from a smaller to a larger unit (if a mile is not 1.56km, then damn me or smth). The only reason Football fields get used commonly is because we made way too many, and every U.S. citizen is either a Baseball or a Football fan regardless of their consent.

Also don't act like tons/tonnes are any different cause there are three versions of those (Imperial, US customary, Metric) and none of them are the same, which is way more confusing than any one system alone could cause. I'm almost certain this is why Kgs and Lbs are used instead.

I feel a lot of people forget that the Imperial system isn't really anymore arbitrary than the Metric system, all the units are standardized and can be converted between each other if you put in even the lousiest effort. Just because they aren't Base-10 doesn't mean they are anymore or less difficult to use or learn than a meter or liter. It's just the difference between Degrees, Clock-hands, and a Compass. All three can tell you what direction to look in or where something should point, some of them are relative to you, some of them are relative to something else, they still tell you a direction.